SnapABug, a tool that allows you to embed a screen capture help widget on your site, has taken advantage of the recently released new version of the Pivotal Tracker API (V3) to improve the integration between SnapABug and Pivotal Tracker. SnapABug can now automatically upload web page snapshots as Tracker story file attachments.

Read more about this feature and other improvements here.

We've added Zendesk to the list of applications that Tracker integrates with. Zendesk is a "beautifully simple", on demand customer support help desk system. This integration allows your development team to prioritize and collaborate around Zendesk tickets as linked Tracker stories, bringing development and support closer together in your organization.

Pivotal Tracker will be down for an upgrade tonight, Friday (2/12/10), starting at 7pm PST. We anticipate to be back up within about an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

This Pivotal Tracker update allows you to see GitHub or other SCM commits in your stories, your project activity in your team's Campfire chat room, and introduces the first wave of integrations with other bug/issue tracking applications including JIRA, Lighthouse, and Satisfaction.

There is also a new version of the API (V3), with support for moving stories, file attachments, as well as activity web hooks. The first version of the API (V1) is no longer available.

Continue reading for more details on what's new.

We are planing to do a Tracker upgrade (with new features including API V3 and some integrations) tomorrow, Saturday Jan 23, at 5:30pm PST. We expect the upgrade to take under two hours.

Also, Engine Yard will be performing some maintenance and upgrades our hardware cluster on Sunday, from 10:00am to 1:00pm PST.

Sorry for the inconvenience. If you need access to your project data during the downtime, we recommend you export your project(s) beforehand:

http://www.pivotaltracker.com/help#howcaniexportstoriesfrommyproject

Also, as a reminder, the first version of the API (V1) will be disabled as part of tomorrow's release. More information on that here.

If you've been looking for a way to turn emails into Tracker stories, take a look at tgethr. It's an email collaboration service for groups, and it now integrates with Pivotal Tracker.

Read about it in this tgethr blog post.

We're planning a Pivotal Tracker upgrade on Jan 23. As part of this release, we will be introducing a new API version (V3), which will make it easier to follow project activity, allow you to add file attachments, move (re-prioritize) stories, associate source commits with stories, and more.

The current API version (V2) will not change, but V1 will no longer work. If you're still using V1, you will need to change your client code to use V2 or V3.

To find out what's changing in V3, continue reading.

Written by our friends at Hashrocket, Slurper lets you create stories as plain text files and import them into Tracker via the API. Also, if you use Vim, check out slurper.vim, a Vim companion script with syntax highlighting and key mappings.

Adam Lowe's blog post talks about these really useful new tools in more detail.

For other Tracker tools, see the 3rd Party Tools page.

MobiTracker, written by Steven Nie, is a new iPhone app for Pivotal Tracker. It uses the Pivotal Tracker API, and supports off-line reading and editing of stories, search, email, and more.

MobiTracker is available for download now on iTunes.

The Pivotal Tracker API has now been available for just over a year, and we're really pleased with the rich variety of tools and applications that our user community has built with it, to extend Tracker's functionality. There are now integration tools, wrappers for various programming languages, mobile apps, an IRC console, and many more on the way (see the 3rd party tools page for a comprehensive list).

We're continuing to improve the API based on your feedback. Recently, we've added the ability to create projects, manage project members, and search for stories based on created and last modified dates. For the next API release, we're adding ability to move a story relative to another story, add file attachments, and get current project velocity and all labels. We're also adding support for Github post-commit hooks, so you can do things like "finishes #123456" in your commit messages.

The most exciting new feature that we're working on, though, is a push webhook, which will allow your applications to listen to activity in your Tracker project(s). You'll be able to register a URL, per project, to which Tracker will post all story changes to (as XML). With this webhook, we're hoping to enable a whole new class of 3rd party tools and applications, for example to facilitate 2 way integration with bug tools.

Most of these enhancements will be part of a new version of the API (V3), which we hope to have ready at the end of the year. As part of this release, we will also be turning off the first version of the API (V1), so if you're still using that version, you'll need to update your client code to V2 prior to that. V2 is the current version, documented on the [API Help page]. For the exact date of this release, watch this blog, or follow @pivotaltracker.

As always, your feedback is welcome. If you have ideas for other things that would be useful to add to the API, or have built a tool you'd like to share, let us know!

dan